The word "cruddy" accurately describes every aspect of Roberta Rohbeson's young
life. The adolescent Roberta, who's working on an autobiographical "book" that
makes up most of Lynda Barry's frighteningly good novel, begins her story thus:
"Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the
cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar
system, universe . . . " In a page-long rant, Roberta uses
"cruddy" dozens of times to describe her surroundings, her family, herself. And
really, she's not overstating the case. Barry's book opens, jarringly, with
Roberta's suicide note. And the story of poverty, parental incompetence, and
mass murder Roberta goes on to detail is almost unimaginably hideous.

But imagine it you do, with an unsettling sense of exhilaration. Barry, the
author of the book and Off Broadway play The Good Times Are Killing Me,
takes the darkly giddy mania, clear-eyed insights, and hallucinatory horror of
her comic strip about adolescent angst, Ernie Pook's Comeek, and injects
them into that most conventional of genres, the coming-of-age novel. But
Barry's literary artistry is what makes the result so impressive. She's set the
coming-of-age novel on fire, and she's a master at controlling the blaze.

Roberta's saga begins in 1971 in a depressed Western meatpacking town. She's a
16-year-old high-school outcast who drops a lot of acid with Vicky, her trashy
best friend, and Turtle, an arch, oblique hippie who is her occasional
boyfriend. She lives in a ramshackle rented house with her mother, a cold,
selfish nurse who will soon abandon Roberta and her half-sister, Julie.
Roberta's father is dead -- and Roberta admits right away that she was the one
who killed him.

This terrible episode occurred several years earlier, when Roberta's father,
who called himself Billy Badass, took her against her will on a cross-country
crime spree. The father-daughter outing culminated in the Lucky Chief Motel
Massacre, in which a group of motel residents were slaughtered near a
restricted, government-owned part of the Nevada desert called Dreamland. Only a
blood-spattered Roberta, her dog Cookie, and three large suitcases full of cash
survived the massacre. And today no one but Roberta knows the whereabouts of
the money, now hidden in desert caves.

The narrative alternates between Roberta's adolescence, with its drug trips
and sexual experimentation, and her dire adventures in 1967 with her father,
who had masterminded a complicated plan to steal back the family slaughterhouse
fortune from which his own father, a suicide, had disinherited him. Their
journey is a scarring affair in which Roberta's father, referring to his
kidnapped daughter as his son "Clyde," careens in a dented green DeSoto from
one skeevy friend's house to the next, chugs a brew called Old Skull Popper,
and manically fast-talks about his days in the Navy and the many methods there
are for getting one over on people. A former butcher, he carries a bag of
knives, his favorite being a razor-fine blade he's nicknamed Little Debbie.

On one level, Mr. Badass is just a hapless all-American loser, the kind of guy
who bellows, "You have nothing to fear 'til you run out of beer." On another,
he's the demon father incarnate, a butcher in more than one sense. Yet Barry
also manages to make him, if not exactly likable, then at least not without his
good points. He counsels his daughter, "No matter what, expect the unexpected.
And whenever possible BE the unexpected." And indeed, he possesses the
disarming ability to gain control over any situation by throwing it into utter
and sometimes comical chaos. Toward the end of her ordeal, Roberta asks, "After
all the things that happened, described and undescribed, if I told you I still
loved the father would you understand it?" Somehow, you do.

Barry's novel is as sharply crafted as Little Debbie. Though Roberta's
opening suicide note warns readers not to "blame the drugs" that she consumes
in huge quantities, there is always the distinct possibility that her
nightmarish past is, in fact, a hallucination. On the other hand, though many
events are outrageous (Roberta deftly dismembers a sheriff who tries to molest
her), and some unlikely (Roberta for years hides Little Debbie in her favorite
clothing accessory, a sock monkey called Trina), none of it is impossible.

Is Cruddy meant to be taken literally, or is it a gruesome,
gender-bending Oedipal fantasy? The answer is never obvious, but something
called "dazzle camouflage" is a helpful recurring theme. Roberta, paraphrasing
her father, vividly describes it: "It was the Navy that figured out you could
paint something with confusions so horror-bright that the eyeballs would get
upset to where they refused to see. Battleships were painted this way and the
bomber planes just passed them by." There's much that's horror-bright here, but
it's the stealthy activity beneath the gory glare that ultimately settles in
your mind. After offering up a hysterically violent and scarily funny
spectacle, Barry then moves in for the kill: a story that uncompromisingly
evokes the sheer vulnerability, cold fears, and searing tactility of childhood.
But you'd never feel these deeper qualities so intensely without all the
dazzling camouflage.